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Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
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Arguably, buying gig tickets on the basis of a couple of bonkers music videos is a bad idea. Then again, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's music videos are amazing. Viral smash Pon Pon Pon is her most notorious work, but others, particularly Waste Land and Candy Candy, are a fantastic showcase of her 'throw everything including the kitchen sink into the video' style.
If you clicked any of those links having not seen her before, you've probably either closed the window in confusion or dug her super-surreal hi-octane imagery. Also, if you watched Pon Pon Pon, then congratulations! You now have that playing on a loop in your head for a week.
So it's pretty safe to say she's an acquired taste. Even as someone who enjoys Kyary in small doses, I was a bit apprehensive about a full concert of her music. Not helping matters is that her team were at pains to let the British press know that "Kyary is not supposed to be musically talented. She is more about image." So it was to some surprise that Crazy Party Time 2015 not only supplied the expected Harajuku fashion-weirdness, but was genuinely musically enjoyable.
Admittedly, I was pretty drunk, but extremely loud pounding techno and giant dubstep drops played accompanied by bright flashing lights does it for me. Kyary herself chirps away in some bizarre hybrid of English and Japanese, singing complex, almost Dylanesque lyrics like: "Chewing chewing chewing chewing chewing cutie cutie chew chewing love" or "Pon pon wei wei wei / pon pon wei pon wei pon pon." Some of her songs appear to be entirely chorus, mantra-like repetitions of five words over and over again until they're tattooed onto your brain.
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| A typical Kyary Pamyu Pamyu gig-goer. |
Compared to a Western pop concert, it's disconcerting how little room Kyary is allowed to express herself. It's like watching a hyper-realistic clockwork girl; someone's wound a key in her back and pushed her out onto the stage. It's a weird sight - a rictus grin plastered over her face as she works through complex semaphoric dance moves and poses so precise she appears to be communicating in sign language.
This total absence of spontaneity makes for a odd atmosphere, contributing to the surreal nature of the music and imagery. There's something faintly inhuman about the way she marches with her legs completely straight around the stage, and the little girl kawaii poses she constantly strikes. She's the multi-coloured centrepiece of the night, yet ably assisted by some fantastic dancers clad in primary coloured wigs, similarly eye-catching dresses and masks that range from grotesque to sweet - looking a bit like a catwalk Sentai team.
All that is accompanied by a video display flashing up imagery from her videos. Googly-eyed skulls rush at us, followed by processions of candle-headed ghouls and kaleidoscope visions candy, cakes and cherries. This onslaught of sweetness is a sight to behold; gazing back over the crowd most people are slack-jawed and beaming, bright lights dancing in their glazed eyes. Lots have come dressed for the occasion, the crowd a sea of pastel-coloured pigtailed wigs, sailor suits and slightly scary face paint - stuff you just don't tend to see at your average floppy-fringed Camden indie gig.
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's Crazy Party Time 2015 wasn't the most musically accomplished concert I've ever attended. It wasn't the most catchy. It wasn't even the craziest. What it was was a hell of a lot of a fun. There was this infectiously good-natured vibe to the whole thing, a crowd buoyed up on Kyary's sugar rush music. The 90 minute set flew by; leaving me exhausted, sweaty and smiling uncontrollably. Damn good times. Damn good.
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Saturday, May 9, 2015
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The eighth of May 2015 was a shitty day in almost all respects. At 6am the sun slithered over the horizon to greet the full horror of a Conservative Party majority government. On television, newspapers, the internet - even video displays on bus shelters - David Cameron beamed, the man turgid with excitement at the prospect of realising his darkest free market fantasies. I was coming off all an all nighter for the election; the experience hurling me through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief.
Having spent most of the day nakedly quivering in fear and disappointment underneath a duvet, I walked into the Brixton Academy with a heavy heart. But c'mon, if any band are going to cheer me up it's going to be the Super Furry Animals.
Led by affable polymath Gruff Rhys, the band are, for my money, the finest band to come out of Wales in the last 20 years (maybe longer!). Though they successfully rode the Britpop wave to success, they never quite rose to the heights of a Blur, Oasis or Pulp. Nonetheless, their unique combination of pop, psychedelia, surreal lyrics and experimentalism has aged beautifully. Now, this 'reunion' tour functions as a tour through Super Furry history, pulling dusty old costumes and props out of storage, running through the best tunes and reminding everyone just how damn good this band is.
The setlist draws from the first half of the career, with only one song from 2005's Lovekraft and nothing from Hey Venus! (2007) or Dark Days/Light Years (2009). Those albums are certainly no slouches, but this is essentially a greatest hits show, so damn near every single and famous album song from their early career is jammed into an extensive and well-curated two hours.
Obvious highlights are the electro surf-rock of (Drawing) Rings Around the World, with scratchy garage band riffs competing with ascending synth lines in the background as Gruff Rhys authoritatively sings "Earth will become Saturn II!" and references Shin'ya Tsukamoto's excellent freak-horror flick Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. Similar fun comes in the stupidly fun Golden Retriever, sending the crowd into a happy, sweaty, bouncy fit of pleasure, as does Something 4 the Weekend from their debut album.
Things take a turn towards low-fi pastoral in a lengthy segue through Mwng, their recently r-released 2000 Welsh language album. This marks the one point in the show where the audience calms down a bit. Mwng is an excellent album, but four peaceful sunset songs in a row drains a little energy from the audience. Plus, it's hard to sing along in Welsh. Even so, there's a perverse thrill in being at a sold out Brixton Academy gig watching a London audience enjoying a series of Welsh language songs.
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But it's Receptacle for the Respectable, Slow Life, Mountain People and Run Christian Run! that left me most dazzled. These songs are epic musical adventures, switching up genres mid-song, willing to have extensive techno interludes and building to gargantuan, sensory overloading, maelstroms of sound and light. A gigantic projection screen playing snatches of blurred archive footage, remixes of their videos and what looks like recreations of the 'Beyond the Infinite' sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. On top of that, a tiny spherical robot positioned at stage rear emits hypnotic laser rainbow loops. Slices of light revolve above us, transforming the slowly evaporating sweat of the crowd into shimmering, dancing fractal patterns. It's pretty far out.
My highlight of highlights was Hello Sunshine. This gentle Beatles-y number is one of their best songs and contains the immortally romantic couplet "I'm a minger. You're a minger too. So come on minger, I want to ming with you." It's touching, humble, sweet and funny all at once - the cherry on top of a perfectly happy pop song. But last night something weird happened. Midway through the song, the band paused before those famous lines and the crowd spontaneously went completely fucking bananas. This wasn't an ordinary cheer, more like some psychic release valve being opened. For me, after an incredibly shitty day it was the first time I felt a glimmer of hope pierce the misery. For the only point that night the band looked perplexed, looking over at each other and shrugging. With no sign of it abating, Gruff Rhys smiled and gave us a confused thumbs-up, allowing him to get on with the song.
With that, and the climactic mass mosh pit of The Man Don't Give a Fuck, I left the place cheered up. Unless you're a rich man the next five years are going to be a grim era of ashes and tears, but even in the midst of that there's still precious moments that we need to cling onto as tightly as we can.
It was a truly excellent gig, underlining the this band's place in the British musical canon and reminding us of the sheer wealth of pleasures contained in the band's songbook. Though Gruff Rhys, with his solo albums, side projects and documentaries, is far from a distant presence, I hope the Super Furry Animals project remains a going concern. There's an abundance of life, good cheer and joy in the Super Furry Animals - who're capable of putting a silver lining on even the most threateningly grey and gigantic of clouds.
Super Furry Animals play the Brixton Academy again tonight
All pictures used courtesy of Jason Williamson. www.jasonwilliamsonphotography.co.uk
All pictures used courtesy of Jason Williamson. www.jasonwilliamsonphotography.co.uk
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Thursday, March 19, 2015
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Jesus fucking Christ. Where to begin? I've been a lot of bizarre concerts and heard a lot of weird music. But Squarepusher at the Barbican was (by some distance) the craziest, most aggressive electronic gig I've ever attended. Firmly putting the 'mental' in 'experimental music', this was about 90 minutes of ear-splitting, atonal noise accompanied by gigantic epilepsy-inducing abstract visuals.
Squarepusher (aka Tom Jenkinson) emerged from the electronica scene of the mid-90s and has subsequently been producing music that ranges from drum n' bass to soothing ambient electro (and almost everything in between). I got into him after seeing the Chris Cunningham directed video for Come On My Selector sometime in the late 90s, my teenage self highly impressed with the equally barmy audio and visuals. Now, after forays into jazz, solo bass guitar and last year's Music for Robots project, in which Jenkinson collaborated with a team of Japanese engineers to create robots capable of playing beyond the capabilities of puny flesh musicians, he's back in the studio for Damogen Furies, his fourteenth album.
2015 is an interesting time for Squarepusher's brand of electronica. With EDM surging in popularity, temptation has come knocking at the door. Cover yourself in LEDs, laser beams and billowing crowds of dry ice, play tracks constructed around gigantic bass drops and watch the money roll in. Though this gig firmly isn't appealing to the mainstream, elements of popular EDM have nonetheless crept in. Hidden amongst the clanging atonal madness are the odd build up and big drop, a couple of synth melodies and what almost sounds like a sample from The Cure's Just Like Heaven. That aside, this is fiercely aggressive, head-meltingly strange music - bizarre to the point that I'm perplexed that enough people like this stuff to fill the Barbican Hall.
As I sat there getting my face blasted off I looked around the seated crowd, wondering just who the hell these people were. I can only assume they're old school rave casualties: so accustomed to high BPM acid-techno that they can now stomach only the most corrosive of of corrosive music. Even among this sturdy lot reactions varied; one gangly man attempted to gain access to the stage, then proceeded to cavort, limbs flailing, around the auditorium, closely pursued by security. Conversely a steady stream of people left throughout the show, presumably having been bludgeoned into submission by what was blaring out of the speakers.
As for me? From minute one I didn't know which way was up. I felt like a prospective astronaut in high-G training, spun to dizzy unconsciousness in a giant centrifuge. At times it was like I was hearing five gigs at once, jagged shards of sound jumbling up together into something weird and alien. The brain doesn't quite know which angle to approach this from, the moment you identify what could plausibly be melodic progression things collapse into a hail of dissonant squeals and beeps. At it's peak I'm listening to music so fast that's one or two steps removed from static; a decent simulation of what it's like to be a superintelligent robot with a really bad migraine.
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| One of the visuals. |
The visuals are similarly screwed. Endless tunnels of glitched out graphics and monochrome DOS smears pop up at a rate of two a second. Complex patterns, text and diagrams spin past, too rapid for the brain to process. The effect is as if Squarepusher is downloading something directly into our minds, beating the doors of perception tdown. There's a cyberpunk flavour throughout, the iconography of computing harnessed in an attempt to simulate silicon life. Eyes glued, ears ringing and mouth hanging slackly open it's as if you're living through William Gibson's wettest dream.
It ends with a hundred ears ringing in unison and shellshocked eyes blinking in confusion. I'm not sure I 'enjoyed' this gig per se, it was more as if something had happened to me over which I had no control, like being swept up in an tsunami of noise. On a visceral level I feel (even the next day) like a pneumatic drill has been taken to my head, but I also feel a strange calm, no matter what craziness the world throws at me I can probably deal with.
Squarepusher is really pushing the boat out here - casting his net towards the bonkers end of the musical spectrum in an avalanche of unfriendly abstract sound. It's hard to imagine how much further he could go than this. It's hard to imagine that audiences could take much more than this.
Squarepusher is really pushing the boat out here - casting his net towards the bonkers end of the musical spectrum in an avalanche of unfriendly abstract sound. It's hard to imagine how much further he could go than this. It's hard to imagine that audiences could take much more than this.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
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But the real crunchy, wriggly, deliciously creamy core of Damien Chazelle's film stems from the fact that, while it's very much about jazz drumming, it's just as much a warped satire on sports movies, a homoerotic BDSM duologue and an examination of precisely what you have to sacrifice to achieve perfection.
Set at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, NY (the best music school in the United States) our hero is Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), a 19 year old jazz drummer. He's an undoubtedly talented, hard-working musician, light years beyond 99.9% of other musicians. Unfortunately in Shaffer's populated with the rest of the 0.01% and so he's struggling to find his moment to shine. He needs recognition fast as his ambition is to be none other than one of the greatest jazz drummers... of all time!
One day, in the midst of Neiman's practice session the feared and respected leader of Shaffer's studio band, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), stops in to listen. Fletcher simply radiates terrifying authority; his eyes are laser sights; his veins high voltage power cables; and his mouth a machine-gun dispensing belittling insults. Of all the dominating presences that've strolled across cinema screens in the last year Simmons' Fletcher beats them all into a cocked hat.
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This man is a monster, but a monster with a purpose. His philosophy is that true genius is only revealed through hardship; that no all-time great ever got where they were by being told their work as "good enough". He considers his rage, sadism and intimidation tactics the fire in a kiln, baking his students with blistering heat until they emerge rock-hard, invincible ultramusicians.
The rest of the film chronicles Fletcher's effects on Neiman, taking his initial lump of doughy clay and beating it into something special. Though there's a couple of other characters in the film (Neiman's father and new girlfriend), they're largely extraneous, functioning as prisms through which we witness the metamorphosis from man to drum machine. The drive for perfection is a messy one, screwing up Neiman's mind, body and soul - the anger and drive that Fletcher pours into his student leaving little room for human weaknesses like emotion and conscience.
So we zero in on the relationship between two people, the masochist and sadist (and thus the double-meaning of the title is revealed). Though Neiman initially whimpers and blubs under Fletcher's barrage of insults, we see him slowly growing to crave them. It's a similar situation with the pain: practicing so hard his hands become blood-soaked (as does his drum kit). But as he dunks his bleeding fists into buckets of ice water he gasps in orgasmic bliss. After all, if it hurts this much it's got to be improving him, right?
Where Whiplash gets interesting is that it refuses to condemn Fletcher's methods. That a film can come out and argue that unvarnished psychological abuse can genuinely work is brave and lightly satirical. In this it shares some DNA with Steven Shainberg's Secretary, taking extreme behaviour that 'normal' people simply can't comprehend and explaining its worth.
Cementing the satire is that we come to realise that practically nobody outside this tiny clique gives a toss about jazz-drumming. Fletcher bemoans the rise of "Starbucks jazz compilations", apparently unaware that this pretty much is jazz nowadays. It's notable that in the scenes set outside the school nobody cares, understands or pays attention to the music; even in a scene set in a jazz bar the reaction of the patrons is cool indifference. This rises to a hilarious peak in the concert scenes; the fact that the camera is locked on the two men conceals the fact that these massive venues are almost entirely empty, the herculean efforts of the characters songs greeted by polite, muted applause. The punchline comes in the climactic scenes when Neiman's father finally sees his son transformed into a monstrous, inhuman drumming machine. In an ordinary movie this would be where he beams in pride, instead he looks on with horror and confusion.
Sacrificing everything purely to become a master at some obscure art is at the heart of ascetic cinema; from umpteen martial arts movies right through to boxing movies and this film's direct antecedent, Black Swan. Whiplash presents a way of teaching that's in sharp opposition to the touchy-feely/instant-validation hug-based philosophy that appears so prevalent these days. In scenes where concerned parents, afraid that their little angel is being called names by the nasty music teacher, conspire to him sacked we look down their noses. These morons could never understand perfection. Nuts to them I say. I'm totally on board with Fletcher's style.
So go and see Whiplash. Marvel at the two stunning performances by Teller and Simmons, coo at the ultra-slick pin-point editing, tap your toe at the rat-a-tat pace, chuckle at the outre insults and let your jaw hang low at the stunning/terrifying final drum sequence. Best drum film ever? Certainly. Maybe one of the best music films ever too.
★★★★★
Whiplash is released 16th January 2015
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| and Bottom |
Cementing the satire is that we come to realise that practically nobody outside this tiny clique gives a toss about jazz-drumming. Fletcher bemoans the rise of "Starbucks jazz compilations", apparently unaware that this pretty much is jazz nowadays. It's notable that in the scenes set outside the school nobody cares, understands or pays attention to the music; even in a scene set in a jazz bar the reaction of the patrons is cool indifference. This rises to a hilarious peak in the concert scenes; the fact that the camera is locked on the two men conceals the fact that these massive venues are almost entirely empty, the herculean efforts of the characters songs greeted by polite, muted applause. The punchline comes in the climactic scenes when Neiman's father finally sees his son transformed into a monstrous, inhuman drumming machine. In an ordinary movie this would be where he beams in pride, instead he looks on with horror and confusion.
Sacrificing everything purely to become a master at some obscure art is at the heart of ascetic cinema; from umpteen martial arts movies right through to boxing movies and this film's direct antecedent, Black Swan. Whiplash presents a way of teaching that's in sharp opposition to the touchy-feely/instant-validation hug-based philosophy that appears so prevalent these days. In scenes where concerned parents, afraid that their little angel is being called names by the nasty music teacher, conspire to him sacked we look down their noses. These morons could never understand perfection. Nuts to them I say. I'm totally on board with Fletcher's style.
So go and see Whiplash. Marvel at the two stunning performances by Teller and Simmons, coo at the ultra-slick pin-point editing, tap your toe at the rat-a-tat pace, chuckle at the outre insults and let your jaw hang low at the stunning/terrifying final drum sequence. Best drum film ever? Certainly. Maybe one of the best music films ever too.
★★★★★
Whiplash is released 16th January 2015
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
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As shiny new 2015 hoves into view, I've got to admit I'm going to miss the ol' scuffed up, 2014. I squeezed in an awful lot into 365 days, so with New Year approaching here's a few traditional 'Best of' lists. Today: gigs! To come: albums, films, plays, art and maybe videogames.
Honourable Mentions:
Eels at Royal Albert Hall, 30th June 2014
After a physically and mentally exhausting Glastonbury Festival the last thing I wanted to do was troop across London to see yet more live music. But then Beautiful Freak was one of the first albums I ever owned and for many years Eels were my favourite band. A couple of years of middling albums haven taken the shine off them, so I was there out of duty more than genuine passion. But Mark Oliver Everett and company knocked me for six, reminding me precisely why younger me was so doolally over him. The perfect way to get through the post festival blues.
'Miley Cyrus: Bangerz' at the o2 Arena, 6th May 2014
They laughed - laughed - at me for splashing out £50 on a Miley Cyrus ticket! Joke's on them, she was one of the funnest/weirdest/bonkers things I saw all year. Admittedly, a 30 year old man turning up alone to a Miley Cyrus gig isn't the greatest look, but I don't regret a single moment. Even leaving aside the bonkers cartoons and psychedelic cat projections, Bangerz is a goddamn excellent pop album, and hearing songs like Adore You, SMS Bangerz and 4x4 played at ear-splitting volume made me grin like an idiot. Pop concert as sensory overload.
St Vincent at The Cambridge Junction, 19th August 2014
Well I didn't manage to score Kate Bush tickets (not for want of trying mind you), but Annie Clarke was probably the better gig. 2014 was the year St Vincent blossomed from 'merely' great into spectacular. After knocking me dead at a festival gig over the summer I immediately got gig tickets to see her in Cambridge (her Roundhouse gigclashed with an ultimately disappointing Lady Gaga gig). It was amazing, the kind of artist that turns her fans into evangelists and blows your mind clean out. While she plays there may as well not be any other musicians in the world. Annie Clarke is a class apart, a woman so talented you feel privileged to be spending time in the same room as her.
WINNER:
Dolly Parton at Glastonbury Festival, 29th June 2014
After 4 days and nights of non-stop partying, torrential rain and glue-like mud I thought I'd exhausted my brain's serotonin reserves. Running on just a couple of hours sleep, Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury found me a numb zombie, barely able to lift a paper cup of beer to my mouth. I am no real fan of Dolly Parton; but like most people I like 9 to 5, Jolene and so on, and figured as everyone was going I may as well go along too.
The very second she took to the stage it was like I learned how to experience emotion for the first time. She sent waves of good vibes careening around the 100,000 strong crowd, sending us into a worshipful fervous. It was powerfully amazing, leaving me astonished that, of all genres, country and western gave me a bigger buzz than all the mad-mental-crazy dance music that's my festival. From then until the day I die, Dolly Parton will hold a very special place in my heart.
Glastonbury was amazing, but she was the cherry on top of the cake.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
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Prior to Lady Gaga I was a musically boring fuck. The kind of chump who quivered at the announcement of a new Radiohead album or swooned over linen-shirted, bearded middle-aged men who clutch acoustic guitars like drowning men clutch liferafts. Then I chanced across her 2009 VMA performance of Paparazzi. Four minutes later, lost in a blizzard of glitter, flashbulbs, crutches, lots fake blood and demented piano playing, I was smitten.
From that point on, as far as I was concerned this was it. A perfect storm of performance art, theatre, pop and fashion - all encapsulated in a smart as hell, beautiful and risk-taking New Yorker. Everything else in music seemed suddenly desaturated; as far as I'm concerned there's more honesty, truth and beauty in lyrics like "Let's have some fun / This beat is sick / I wanna take a ride on your disco stick" than there are in a thousand albums by noodly, string-backed acoustic warblers.
For a couple of years it was good, and we enjoyed Lady Gaga's imperial phase. The triple combo of videos for Bad Romance, Telephone and Alejandro cemented her as the pop vision of the future; suddenly everyone started to look a little cooler. Then came the colossally hyped Born This Way, which despite a tonne of great songs felt slightly bloated. Then out came ARTPOP, which is actually pretty good, but the knives were pre-sharpened. The pop music mill hungers for new flesh; and even Gaga, a popstar who shuffles personalities like a cardshark shuffles a deck, couldn't ride it forever.
And so we come to the artRAVE. Is this Gaga's Waterloo? One last big budget, stadium-sized splurge of extravagance before she slips into a comfortable place in the pop firmament; beloved by her fanbase, fondly remembered but never again truly on top? If it is she certainly isn't going quietly; from start to finish we're dragged into a shimmering slice of pop nirvana. Perspex walkways snake in organic shapes around the arena floor, allowing Gaga and her dancers to move around and over the audience.
This 'Little Monsters' friendly staging gives this night a unique sparkle. With the heavenly scenery, the arena takes the aura of a religious revival with Gaga as high priestess leading us to sartorially adventurous promised land of sexual tolerance and unlimited self expression. I imagine that if you're not a fan, Gaga's messianic streak might seem a touch egotistical. But she's among her die-hard fans, and to them she's divinity made flesh. You can taste their rapture it in the way they stretch their glitter-polished fingers towards her, hoping her touch will cure them of some modern scrofula.
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This builds to an emotional pinnacle when a note is thrown on stage. Gaga picks it up and reads out a message from a cervical cancer sufferer who explains that Lady Gaga's poptimistic message has helped her fight it. Gaga summons her up to the stage and in a flurry of hugs and kisses grants her personal blessing, then she parks her on a piano stool and devotes an acoustic reworking of Born This Way to her. There's not a dry eye in the house. Oh well, if you're going to have a pop messiah you could do far worse than Lady Gaga.
What surrounds this particularly special little moment is a totally competent pop show that's only slightly hobbled by being based around a slightly below-par album. Of the new songs the perverted mud fuck stomp of Swine is an easy stand out, bleepy/bloopy aerodynamic mission statement of Artpop and the sincere loveliness of Dope and Gypsy. In a 'fuck you' move to her detractors she opens with five songs from her newest album and delivers a slightly out of character broadside against people who are "just here for the hits".
After that it's a relief to hear the still-futuristic ultraparty beat of Just Dance kick in. Cheekily she mashes Poker Face and Telephone into a mini-medley, before launching into a top class Paparazzi. All these are stone-cold poptimistic stunners, and with bass thudding throughout the arena, lasers blasting to the rafters and bewigged, joyful punters bopping around with dopey grins on their faces.
I was one of them. The simple sight of her dancing around on a stage in increasingly sillier outfits (cow patterned octopus girl, furrily-winged Koons-balled angel, what appear to be some folding chairs) flicks some innate joy-switch in my head, sending me spiralling into a blissy paroxysms of joy.
That said, as ace as this was, it wasn't as good as The Monster Ball. That was a Gaga resplendent, confidently perched at the top of the pops. artRAVE finds Lady Gaga ever so slightly on the back foot, obviously stinging from the critical and commercial reception of Artpop and taking solace in the unconditional love of her hardcore Little Monsters. This makes artRAVE more of a transitory show, one eye in the triumphant past and one looking towards an uncertain future.
I'm still deeply smitten. I'll always be. But I'm hungry to see where she's going next.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014
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You'd think we were lambs being led to the slaughter. After an hour's wait in a Hackney back street we're urged down a concrete ramp towards a dark cellar. Our phones are stripped from us and bouncers systematically rifle through our pockets for recording devices. Finally we emerge into a ill-lit cement basement. The remains of a 1960s paintjob peel from the walls and old industrial fossils rustily jut from the ceiling.
It's moody, creepy and slightly oppressive. The perfect spot to experience new Aphex Twin then. Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin, aka AFX, aka Polygon Window, aka The Tuss etc etc) is the mystery King of electronic music: the Mozart of mixers, the Beethoven of the breakbeat, the Shostakovich of sampling, the uh.. Kirchner of the Korg PS-3300. He's the guy playing chess while his contemporaries are still struck on whack-a-mole. James inhabits a mist of pseudonyms, half-truths and urban legends, more than happy to let bizarre stories about his reclusive life and behaviour spread like wildfire - the enigma made ironic by constantly using his own sinisterly grinning face as a visual motif.
Much hype surrounds Syro being his first album in 13 years - as if James had been sitting around twiddling his thumbs since the 2001 release of Drukqs. Frankly his output over this period diminishes the importance of the 'traditional' album release, including the monumental Analord series (four and a half hours of music over 11 EPs), his anonymous work as 'Brian and Karen Tregaskin', a (likely fictional) couple collaborating under the pseudonym 'The Tuss' and, apparently, ten completed and unreleased albums he doesn't feel ready to release yet.
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| This is a good way of announcing an album. |
But the subject of tonight's event, Syro, described by James as his "most accessible" record yet is very much ready to go. 'Accessible' is like a slight misnomer when it comes to Aphex Twin; his brand of insanely complex, sometimes aggressive and idiosyncratic dance music makes no concessions to commercial musical trends. But it is accessible in that, unlike most high-falutin' experimental music, you can rave your tits off to it.
As the crowd finishes filing in, we stand, lit only by the soft yellow/green glow of a projector. Then, *whump* minipops 67 kicks in. I'd listened to it earlier in the day on headphones at home, but standing next to the speaker the initial beats are like taking a blow to the gut. The volume is ear-splittingly intense, the bass rattles my bones, the jelly of my brain wobbles away to the beat. This is a good way to hear music for the first time.
As we progress through the album we quickly hear that unmistakable Aphex sound - the skeleton of the music a beat thudding away in the background while infinitely varied synth melodies, drum flourishes and distorted samples frolic away in the gaps. I hate the genre description 'intelligent dance music' (as James quite rightly pointed out it snootily implies "this is intelligent and everything else is stupid"), but after hearing music like this I can't help but think there's at least something to the description.
His arrhythmic tangles of sounds, somehow both chaotic and ordered tease and cajole the brain. There's just so much going on; the joy of hearing gossamer-light synthesiser melodies flitting into view like a butterflies before vanishing back into the beat. Tiny snare rat-a-tats appear and run away, cheekily pulsating for a few seconds as if in opposition to the thumping bass. Its not so much that this is dance music for intelligent people; more that you get more out of it the more you focus in on it, the music most beautiful in those brief moments where your brainwaves synchronise with what's you're hearing, the sensation of being able to divine order in chaos.
Or you can just let it sweep you away on a blissful amphetamine haze. Listening to an album for the first time is usually a solitary affair for me; going out for a run or lying in bed with headphones on. Experiencing it in a basement full of dancing bodies is a different story altogether. Smiles, whoops and happy claps fill the room when things get dead virtuoso, the mood enhanced by appearance of distorted Aphex logos projected on the wall and the deployment of a very powerful strobe when things get real heavy. At the front of the room an insanely happy, very sweaty fat man is going bananas, stomping and screaming like a caveman that's brought down a mammoth - his presence immeasurably adding to my enjoyment of the music.
This is what James means when he says that Syro is accessible. This is experimental, bold and technically outstanding music, but it's music you can dance to. In a 1995 article in The Wire magazine, they sent an Aphex Twin sampler to experimental music luminary Karlheinz Stockhausen for his opinion. He loftily pronounced that James should "immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions". James responded: "he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine ... then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to."
It's this inclusive, raver friendly ethos that powers Syro, an album utterly unashamed of being dance music. The sway of hips to the beat, the shuffle of feet on the floor and palms shining upwards to the sky aren't something to be embarrassed about, they're the essence of the genre; the irresistible effect on the body of a crazy/fun beat. To deny this is to miss the point. And so, tucked away within the tracks are sonic quotes of twenty years of dance: the music crammed with strangely familiar beats and samples, dredging up memories of 6am sweatboxes, the frantic chewing of gum and pinpoint pupils.
Closing out the album is the beautiful aisatsana, departing from thumping bass for soft, slow, reflective piano repetitions. Birdsong samples waft gently throughout the piece, conjuring up happy times of wandering home from a club in the early morning with promise of a hot cup of tea on arrival, reflecting on all the night. It's the kind of song you wish could go on forever, James apparently never running out of minute pitch shifts and variations on the basic melody. It's lovely.
I sense that musicologists are still going to be listening to, unpicking and appreciating Richard D James a century from now. I just hope they still know how to dance.
Syro is released 19th September on Warp Records.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
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“Gotta make way for the homo superior”. Amidst a din of clattering guitars, maniacal whoops and digital noise, Bowie's words ran laps around my head. Why? Because I'm pretty damn sure Annie Clark is the next stage in human evolution. On stage she mixes up slithery, chaotic punk rock androgyny with dance moves like an android struggling to break free of its programming – all underscored by guitar virtuosity that's as gobsmacking as it is effortless.
As 2014 began I was already pretty appreciative of St Vincent. Their 2011 album Strange Mercy had rolled around in rotation for a couple of weeks upon release and their 2012 David Byrne collaboration Love This Giant had tickled all my tastes. Then I heard their latest release, the eponymous St Vincent. Hot-shit-god-damn what an album! Shot through with haunting, cryptic vocals that combine the domestic, the technological and weirdly erotic (“Oh what an ordinary day. Take out the garbage, masturbate.”) I was hooked.
Then at Glastonbury I finally saw them. They were up against stiff competition, Jon Hopkins, Disclosure, Jack White and the outstandingly fun Dolly Parton, but emerged by an inch as the best thing I saw all weekend. After a horde of fey young men sitting around mournfully plucking at acoustic guitars and warbling about their feelings, St Vincent functioned as musical electro-shock therapy. As Clarke dove from the stage and thrashed around on the muddy floor, fingers a-blur on the fretboard, fizzling with manic alien energy I fell a tiny bit in love.
The day I got back from the festival I got online to see where she was playing in the UK next. Cambridge? A little far from my usual stomping grounds but fine, whatever. It was worth the trip. It would have been worth going to Mars. At times I thought I was on Mars. Annie Clarke occupies the stage with supreme confidence – her every motion radiating style, every idiosyncratic lyric spilling out of her like she's carved a hole in her head and let her thoughts run rampant.
In person she's some fucked up hybrid of all my loves - like someone's stuffed my favourite musicians into the telepods from Cronenberg's The Fly - the woozy electro lyricism of Bjork with the guitar skills of Prince and the eccentricity and self-assured weirdness of Kate Bush. Wearing a dress covered in sequinned eyes and brace-toothed mouths (all bleeding) and moving in a way that suggests she's communicating secret codes it's difficult to take my eyes from her. Standing pressed against the front row centre I fool myself into thinking she's often staring right at me, making me feel like a deer caught in a hunter's spotlight.
My highlights are all songs from her most recent album. Digital Witness is elegant and precise, a circus stomp pah-rump paean to the blurred lines between fleshy reality and the electronic world. To hear Bring Me Your Loves live is to tumble down a mountain in a skip full of broken synthesisers, her guitar sounding like an old modem screeching down a phone line, the song punctuated with killer, crunchy-as-hell riffs. Best is Huey Newton with its hallucinatory painkiller lyrics. Midway through there's a bass drop so fierce that Skrillex stares on with envious eyes, and Clarke launches into a guttural stream of consciousness about “fatherless features, you motherless creatures” and “the pop and the hiss in the city of misfits”. The fluids in my body are fizzling with bass, strobes are threatening an early epileptic end and once again, she seems to be singing these words right at me.
Being stage front for a show like this is like chewing through a high voltage cable. My musical tastes tend towards the energetic and pounding, but here even the slower, more emotional songs reek of majesty. Temporarily shorn of her guitar, Clarke mounts the giant pink steps at the rear of the stage and poses like a renaissance painting. She's illuminated in bright primary colours, singing softly through Prince Johnny and I Prefer Your Love – delivering them like torch songs from the year 2200.
So yeah – I had a pretty goddamn great time. St Vincent feel tailored to me in particular, though given the rapturous reception the band got from Cambridge I suspect everyone feels this sensation, just as I'm sure they all felt like Clarke was singing directly at them too. The climax of the concert is the epic Your Lips Are Red – a Class A freakout of clattering, punished guitars and a band going bonkers. Clarke climbs into the audience and starts grabbing people's camera, snapping pictures and grinning madly.
And with that she was gone. St Vincent have had a stratospheric rise in my estimations this year; landing right on the list of bands that I will pull out all the stops to see; regardless of price, location of time. Right now Annie Clarke is at the top of her game; she's Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon, she's Dylan at Newport Folk, she's Hillary on Everest. Go and see her, dammit.
First two pictures courtesy of Matt Thorpe (http://www.matt-thorpephotography.tumblr.com/), last crap one courtesy of my cameraphone.
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Thursday, August 14, 2014
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A music biopic that's not allowed to use one solitary note of the subject's music is a tricky proposition. If we're not here for the music, then what are we here for? The musician's sparkling personality and social life? What fills the gap? Well, John Ridley's film is turns out to be less about the who and why of Jimi Hendrix and more about the sexual, racial and class politics of the 1960s, with Hendrix the prism through which we view society. The result is loose, zoned out and languorous, constantly off into odd little explorations of the psychology of swinging London.
André Benjamin's Jimi Hendrix is a frustratingly gnomic centrepiece. Your usual music biopic protagonist is driven by past tragedy that both accentuates his genius and wrecks his social life, Hendrix just plays guitar beautifully and that's pretty much that. There's a hint of annoyance regarding a broken family, but he's totally absent of any burning internal trauma. In fact he's absent of most things, mumbling his way through the movie while being coaxed towards stardom by a series of well-meaning white women.
First among them is Linda Keith (Imogen Poots). Keith, girlfriend of Keith Richards, spots Hendrix playing in a rubbish band in New York and it is immediately smitten. She coaxes him towards a solo career by essentially mothering him. Imbued with upper-class English forthrightness, she behaves like an LSD gobbling Mary Poppins - ordering that Hendrix sit up straight, eat his vegetables and be charismatic on stage. For all Poots' considerable charm Linda Keith is rather thankless character and, like Hendrix, we quickly grow sick of her.
So it's thankful that once the film reaches London we jettison her in favour of the slightly more interesting Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell). She's a broadly drawn Northern lass with a Sheffield accent, and a far more interesting person to spend time with than Daddy's girl Linda Keith. Even so, though Atwell really gives it some welly we still never quite zero in through the haze, as to what is actually going through her head.
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| Benjamin is great casting. |
This loose vagueness is present throughout the entire film. You could charitably say that Ridley's ambition is to recreate a fuzzy, acid-tinged stoned atmosphere of drugged-out late 60s London. He plays fast and loose with the editing, demonstrating a willingness to make abrupt cuts in the middle of scenes, give us an unexpected dose of quickfire montage or the exact opposite; allowing conversations to ramble on awkwardly for minute after painful minute. There's echoes of Antionioni's Blow-Up and Nicholas Roeg's Performance, and by and large Ridley succeeds in recreating a woozy, chilled out mood with sinister notes distantly rumbling in the background.
Underlying all that care is that, unfortunately, this Jimi Hendrix just isn't very interesting. In a heartfelt and obviously carefully judged performance André Benjamin recaptures the tics and body language we've seen in archive footage, but accurate to reality it might be, this Hendrix just isn't particularly fun to be around. There's a notable scene where he meets Michael X, "the authentic voice of black bitterness" in London. Hendrix is interrogated as to whether he's merely a novelty act for his predominantly white audience, X pointing out that reviews refer to Hendrix as "wild" and "tribal" and that these adjectives never used for white musicians.
It's a fair point. Hendrix's response is a mushy-mouthed hippy-dippy ramble about how everyone is one people and the entire world is his audience. The film unjustly acts like he's won this argument. Later we hear Poots' character remark that Hendrix can be "annoyingly profound". This might well be true, but it's something we see precious little of in Ridley's film.
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| The fashion is also a high point. Hendrix wears some badass shirts. |
The obvious counter-argument to Hendrix not being the most articulate bloke around is that he doesn't communicate with his words, but with his guitar. Problem is, there's not really that much guitar playing in the film and due to them not having any rights to Hendrix's iconic tunes, what we do hear is largely formless jamming. That we never hear even a smidge of classics like Voodoo Chile, All Along the Watchtower or Hey Joe genuinely hurts the film. Robbed of the music, it becomes a bit difficult to remember why we should care about Hendrix's story.
This all culminates in a late scene where Hendrix graphically beats Kathy, now his girlfriend, with a telephone receiver, the film taking it's time to show us the bruises and black eyes he's inflicted. This violence comes from nowhere and is very out of character for Benjamin's chilled out Hendrix. Crossing this moral event horizon makes Benjamin's Hendrix rather unpleasant, and the violence poisons the remaining scenes. It's a tone-deaf inclusion, made even more bizarre by the real life Kathy Etchingham insisting this didn't happen to the extent of considering legal action against the film.
There's a bunch of good stuff in All Is By My Side; Andre Benjamin is great, as is the supporting cast; the fashions of the time are beautifully recreated, the soundtrack is well-picked and there's a conscious effort made to evoke mood through clever editing. Unfortunately without Hendrix's songs the film feels half-formed, and it makes way too many character and tonal missteps to make up for their absence.
★★
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